


Day after day, year after year

by solarfemm



Category: Captain America (Movies)
Genre: Angst, Fluff, Happy Ending, Implied/Referenced Torture, M/M, Post-Avengers: Endgame (Movie)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-14
Updated: 2019-09-14
Packaged: 2020-10-18 17:08:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,533
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20642696
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/solarfemm/pseuds/solarfemm
Summary: It’s 2023 and Bucky rolls over in his bed.





	Day after day, year after year

It’s 2023 and Bucky rolls over in his bed. The space beside him where Steve should be is dappled in sunlight shining through the curtains of his bedroom window. It’s been a week now, and every day he wakes up Steve is not there.

It’s 1937 and Bucky rolls over in his bed. The sunlight shines through the window onto the other bed where Steve is asleep. His soft snores give away his health, worsening over the winter, his sinuses infected again. They have to go to the clinic today to get x-rays, something Steve’s doctor thinks will help him after failing so many times with the rhinologist. Day after day, doctor after doctor, it never seems to end. Sometimes Steve is so sick he can’t get out of bed. Other times he’s chasing Bucky around the apartment, a spring in his step, barely able to wait to head down to the navy yard to start sketching in the morning light, but not today. 

It’s 2017 and Bucky rolls over in their bed. Steve is asleep next to him, a wall of warm flesh and muscle that Bucky burrows against to stave off the cold, pressing the tip of his nose into the dip of Steve’s spine to warm it up. Steve doesn’t notice. He’s still snoring.

It’s 2014 and Bucky wakes up on his bed, a dirty mattress on the floor. The hospital he’s in was decommissioned years before it became a shelter for addicts and the homeless, and a Hydra base before that. The others in here don’t come near the crazy guy with the metal arm and seven different knives on him that they can see. The gurney shoved up against the wall has straps and handcuffs, and is covered in blood. Most of it is Bucky’s. 

~

It’s 2019 and Steve is alone. He walks around his apartment alone. He travels to the support group meetings alone. He visits the Avengers base where he knows Nat will be, but after he’s seen her he goes home alone. Every part of him aches for what he used to know, but it’s gone.

It’s 1943 and Steve is alone. Bucky has gone to basic, and with him the taste of his lips after coming home drunk from one of the few bars on Sands street where the drinks taste like piss, overcharged anyway, but they can touch each other like they want to and no one bats an eyelid. Bucky is gone, and Steve is terrifyingly aware of his position in the world as a young white gay man living in New York. He’s always felt at home in the neighborhood since he moved in, but it’s different now he doesn’t have anyone to come home to. The streets seem meaner, the dark darker, and the cold a little colder.

It’s 1936 and Steve is alone in his ma’s apartment. The fruit and bread he bought her yesterday morning are still on the counter, still ripe and fresh. He picks an orange out of the bunch and digs his thumbs into it, the juice spraying into the air, hitting his white shirt in puffs. He peels the skin off and lets it fall to the floor. He brings the orange to his mouth and digs his teeth into it. The first taste is a spark of life and joy bursting onto his tongue. He eats and eats while the juice dribbles down his chin and neck and hands and wrists and stains his shirt. He is still alone.

It’s 2011 and Steve is more alone that he’s ever been. Even when his ma died he had Bucky and the Barneses. Even when Bucky died during the war he had an army behind him. But Steve is now truly, horribly alone. The fact eats at him more each day. He doesn’t recognise this world that he’s in, and even less the people. He’s famous still, but he’s a fossil. He has no wars to fight. The world doesn’t need him. He has nothing left to live for.

~

It’s 2016 and Bucky might be dying soon. He doesn’t plan to. He goes to the markets like he does every day, and every day he thinks, this will be the day that I die. If it’s going to happen, at least he will be prepared for it. He’s not prepared for his face on the news, but he is prepared for Steve Rogers in his apartment. He’s prepared for the SWAT team. He’s prepared for it. But it still happens.

It’s 2011 and soldat knows he will die if he doesn’t complete this mission. The engineer needs to die, but the Widow needs to live. The wind rustles his hair. The sun-baked earth provides no cover. He picks his shot carefully. He squeezes the trigger.

It’s 1943 and he wishes he was dead. He must be dead, because he hears Steve’s voice, and it can’t be true. Steve is back home, a thousand miles and years and lifetimes away from the dungeon they’re keeping him in where they slice him open and fill his veins, but then Steve’s there, and he must be dead. He must be dying, and going to heaven, but he’s not. 

It’s 1938 and Bucky feels alive. He still feels the tingle on his lips as he walks to work. The sun is shining, the sky is blue, the air is warm, and Steve kissed him. Steve _kissed_ him, Bucky. He’s 20 years old in the midst of a recession, Steve’s just gotten over his third cold of the year (already), and when Bucky spent too long staring at him, Steve said it, the words Bucky’d been wanting to hear even without knowing he did. Steve said, “I don’t want to ruin our friendship but I really wanna kiss y—” and Bucky had jumped the gun too quick, too desperate for whatever was coming out of Steve’s mouth, said, “Ruin it,” and Steve did, just like that. Just like that.

~

It’s 1944 and Steve is bleeding out into a ditch somewhere in Nord. Shells are raining down on him and Bucky’s yelling at him, something about being a fucking idiot the likes of which he ain’t never seen, while Morita applies pressure to the stab wound in his neck without taking the knife out. They get them in the end, and Steve survives. As always, he survives. 

It’s 1935 and Steve is sketching, sketching. Bucky’s asleep on the couch, his feet in Steve’s lap, still sweaty from the walk home from art class. It’s a hot one, and Steve feels alive with the fire burning under his skin, the way it does when something good is about to happen. This year, it’s going to be something special.

It’s 1935 and Steve is shuffling from Prospect Park back home as the night sets in, his whole mind buzzing and buzzing. He can still feel the guy’s hands on him, touching him in places no one’s touched him before, kissing his stomach and lower, and he’s so sure everyone he passes can tell that he’s not a virgin anymore. Worse, they can tell he did it with a guy. He’s high on it, the thrill of doing something illegal. If someone wants to clock him they better do it now because he can take it. He can take on anything.

It’s 1944 and Steve is watching Bucky laze about in front of the campfire while Dugan whittles and Gabe plays the harmonica. Bucky whistles along to it, stretched out as the firelight plays across his bare torso, the top part of his uniform abandoned to dry, caked in river mud as it was. Steve is surrounded by his team, his friends, his soldiers, but when Bucky stretches a hand out to grab at Steve’s knee, saying, hey, remember that time—Monty, you won’t fuckin’ believe this—all Steve knows, right then, as he’s always known him, is Bucky.

~

It’s 1956 and Steve has some unfinished business. Peggy tells him no, he can’t stay for dinner. He can’t stay at all, actually. I’m sorry, Steve. She says it in a kind but definite way. She’s made a life for herself, and the world needs him more than she does. He thinks of Bucky, now, frozen, or worse. He thinks of Bucky in 1938 and the moment their lips touched. He thinks of Bucky in 1935, 44, 37, 36, 43. He thinks of Bucky falling off a train. He thinks of the stretch of time between 2010 and 2013 that broke him down into nothing, and how alive he felt when he knew Bucky was too. He thinks of Sam, of Nat. He thinks of his friends. He thinks of his purpose. And he goes back.

It’s 2023 and Bucky kisses him for the first time in a week, in fifteen minutes, in a hundred years. Steve says, I’m sorry, I needed to think, and Bucky says, It’s okay. He says it’s okay in the way he touches Steve, kisses him, loves him. They sit by the water for a while, watching until the sunlight fades and the moon crests the trees, over, up, up.

**Author's Note:**

> I said I'd be thinking about [this](https://twitter.com/incorrectbucko/status/1167164916714954754) for days


End file.
